Liz Truss blames ‘left-wing economic establishment’ for her being the shortest serving PM – 9 top reactions

Not content with being the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister after just 45 days in office, Liz Truss now seems to be going after Matt Hancock’s title as the Tory MP most desperate for a political comeback.

After lying low for a little while after her disastrous mini-budget brought an end to her tenure back in October, the South West Norfolk MP has penned a 4,000-word article for The Telegraph looking to shed light on where it all went wrong.

We read it, so you don’t have to.

In the essay’s opening paragraphs, Ms Truss reveals she has spent “many hours reflecting on what happened” during her time at Downing Street and admitted, “the soul-searching has not been easy”.

We’ll leave it to you to make the jokes about Conservatives having to search for their own souls…

Still going on about the growth of the UK economy which caused her to coin the meme-worthy phrase the “anti-growth coalition”, Ms Truss also took aim at what she considered to be “pessimism and scepticism” about the potential to grow Britain’s finances which is “sadly endemic” at the Treasury.

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“Serious planning reform was dismissed as not politically deliverable; discussing monetary policy was a taboo; deregulation of financial services and other industries was viewed as undermining the prospects of a deal with the EU; and Brexit was seen as a damage-limitation exercise rather than a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” she complained.

Other standout paragraphs from the Telegraph piece include her saying she was “deeply disturbed” by having to ask her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, to stand down, and that her “original policy prescription” was “the right thing to do”. But, it was down to the “forces against it” being “too great” which caused her the biggest difficulty.

She continued: “I am not claiming to be blameless in what happened, but fundamentally I was not given a realistic chance to enact my policies by a very powerful economic establishment, coupled with a lack of political support.

“I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was.

“While I anticipated resistance to my programme from the system, I underestimated the extent of it.”

Of course, when Ms Truss talks about her mandate, she means the 81,326 votes secured by Conservative Party members which got her into No 10 – not the wider population made up of tens of millions of people who aren’t Tory members and thus had no say in who their next prime minister would be.

Fortunately, Twitter was on hand to ridicule Ms Truss’ surprise intervention - including comedian Joe Lycett, who spent the last couple of months of 2022 mocking the Tory MP, including on a now iconic episode of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg where he pretended to be right-wing.

“Missed u babe,” he tweeted, with an added sad face emoji for comedic effect.

With the print version of Ms Truss carrying a headline in which the ex-prime minister blames a “left-wing economic establishment”, others decided to criticise this particular excuse from the Tory MP:

Despite saying she wouldn’t be “blameless”, it was noted that Ms Truss had blamed a fair few people and government departments in the article, and commenters joked about the content itself:

There were also those far more interested in hearing from the lettuce instead – the one which featured on a Daily Star livestream and famously outlasted Ms Truss in terms of longevity:

The Telegraph piece looks set to be the first of a couple of media appearances from Ms Truss in the coming days, with the pork markets fanatic’s interview with The Spectator being released on Monday.

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